VLC is a big one for me.
some new weird video format opens windows stock media player because it’s not yet associated with vlc
“Hey… it looks like your going to have to buy a codec…”
manually open in vlc where it runs seemlessly
I’ll take “things that haven’t happened to me in years for a dollar Alex”.
A variation happened to me last week that’s why it came to mind. Was opening an mp4 recorded on a digital camera on a new laptop. So the stock player had a go and gave a message similar to the above. vlc was installed moments later and of course had no issue…
It won’t keep track of my place in a Playlist to resume so I trashed it.
OBS, and Blender. Two industry shaping software solutions that ere fully open source and free.
Linux, Firefox, virtualization, Blender, KDE Plasma, ffmpeg, Krita, Inkscape, yt-dlp, Godot, programming language toolchains
Off the top of my head from daily use;
- Borg backup, powerful backup software for self-hosted oriented users or enterprise automation.
- proxmox, hypervisor that is performant and easy to setup for simple and complex virtualization needs.
- bitwarden (combined with vaultwarden self-host), password management, secrets management, and available on basically all platforms and browsers. Self hosting your vault gives you peace of mind over who has your most sensitive data.
- obsidian, a great notes app with polished cross platform applications that don’t do any funky proprietary storage shenanigans. Files are files and folders are folders.
- kate (and most of the KDE suite), premiere Linux desktop environment suitable for customization and all the expected luxuries user would expect from windows or macOS. Kate specifically is a noticeable modern upgrade over notepad++ and rivals VSCode for programmers.
Could you expand on what you mean by ‘complex virtualization needs’ - I read this phrase sometimes but would appreciate an expert’s perspective 🙏
My only point was to explain that proxmox is great free software because it supports both simple virtualization needs, such as having several different VMs or containers running on one headless system with very little overhead, and complex multi-system setups that include multiple machines running proxmox and clustered together for both reliability and redundancy with distributed services and applications.
Read Era. They also have a paid option but the free is great as it is!
7zip
I haven’t used windows in about 15 years on my personal machines but see 7zip referenced everywhere…why is it so popular? Can windows 10/11 or whatever we’re on now not compress/extract most things itself or do people prefer it for some reason (nice interface etc)?
I’m always amazed when I’m following a tutorial written for windows and it says “download and install 7zip, then extract the file using 7zip”. I just right click the file and extract it…
Windows only recently got support for 7z and RAR. For the several decades before that, it supported neither.
Recently? Feels like it’s been more than a decade now…I could be wrong though
You are wrong. Until recently Windows did not natively support 7z or unrar.
Looks like just 2 years ago. My bad!
firefox
considering the big monopoly of chrome based is not really free, it’s paid by google or microsoft mining user data
In fairness, Firefox is also paid for by Google.
Firefox gets like 90% of its funding from Google for making Google the default search.
That’s funny, that’s the first thing I change when I set it up on a new device.
Not an app, but a whole ass OS.
Fedora. Switched to Linux full time over a year ago, after years and years and years (like… 06/07?) of dabbling. It blows my mind how polished and wonderful it is to use. It’s completely everything I need, and it always blows my mind that it’s fucking free
Hear hear! I’m living in Fedora-land for school and gaming, and I run into way less trouble than my classmates!
Fedora is awesome. I use the immutable version Kinoite, and it’s fork with non-free extras Aurora. Dev container is with Arch just because there are a ton of packages. All the GUI apps from Flathub.
I need to add KDE to this mix. What a wonderful desktop it is. Like what Windows should be but is not.
Libre Office
F-droid is amazing and distributes amazing software that many people already mentioned.
In order to write software, developers need software. I think we should also mention the GNU packages and LLVM.
Practically every single FOSS application I use is highly useful to me, and of course, free, so I’ll just list them all here.
- Immich - A full-featured replacement for Google Photos, has a sleek UI, face detection, albums, a timeline, etc.
- Paperless-ngx - Document management system, saves me a ton of paper hoarding, and makes everything easily searchable with OCR.
- Syncthing - Simple file synchronization between my devices, on my terms. Doesn’t share data with big tech companies about my files, and hooks up extremely fast P2P connections that beat cloud-based services by a long shot.
- Metube & Seal - Simple interfaces for downloading with yt-dlp, can download from YouTube, but also many other sites. Doesn’t spam you with popup ads or junk redirects like those “youtube downloader” type sites. Seal is my favorite of the two, but is only on Android.
- Image Toolbox - Insanely feature-packed app for doing practically anything you could want to an image. Converting formats, clearing EXIF data, removing backgrounds, feature-packed editing, OCR, convert to SVG, create color palettes, converting PDFs to images, decode and encode Base64 to and from images, extract frames from gifs, encrypt & decrypt files, make zip files, and a lot more. All local.
- Rustdesk - No-nonsense remote desktop, tons of features, simple file transfer, cross-platform compatibility, and P2P communication without needing a third party server if you so choose.
- LibreOffice - Essentially everything you’d get with Office 365 (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint) but without the $150 price point. Compatible with the same file formats, and has the same functionality.
- Cashew - Feature rich financial app for budgeting, tracking purchases, saving for goals, etc. Doesn’t have automatic import, but I find that manually putting every transaction in keeps me aware of my spending much better than before, so for me it’s quite worth it. Install directly from the APK, or use on web though. The version on the app stores has some features locked behind a paywall.
- Linkwarden - Bookmark manager with cross-platform support, a web interface, automatic tagging, automatic archiving of any saved links in multiple formats, collaborative sharing capabilities, and more. It’s free, but you can also pay $3/mo if you want them to host it for you.
Edit: And Umbrel (on Raspberry Pi) if you want to host things more easily. Basically just a much more hands-off, user-friendly docker for people who don’t want to tinker as much.
Edit 2: Non-FOSS, but Obsidian is the best note taking app I’ve ever used. Great selection of community-made plugins (which are FOSS) for additional functionality, and all notes are in standard cross-software-compatible Markdown. No locked-in proprietary formats.
Anki flash cards. I use it everyday and commercial programs can’t hold a candle to it.
Godot
I cant believe it has a better user experience than unity, an app that has a 412 USD/month paid plan
I was waiting for that.
Voyager.
It identifies the species of the plant in a given photo.